"Stumbling Towards Utopia"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, June 20, 2002

There is a famous book on Islam by John Esposito entitled Islam; the Straight Path.  I have always liked that title, which comes from the first chapter of the Qu’ran beseeching God to lead one down the straight path of Islam.  I guess I like that title because we all think that whatever spiritual practice or discipline we may be working on is the Straight Path.  We believe it, whatever it may be, is the shortest and most direct way of living a life of meaning.  I like that idea.  It is comforting to think that you or I am on the express lane to inner peace and tranquility, and we get to bypass all of the local exits of life that lead to places that are irrelevant.  Unfortunately, as comforting as the notion of a “Straight Path” may be, Utopia is not an easy exit to find.  In real life there are missteps in life, asking for directions, turning and returning the map, or even smacking the side of the GPS when we find ourselves in a place we do not want to be.

In her book Stumbling Toward Enlightenment, Parang Geri Larkin provides a different view of spiritual practice.  As the name implies, Larkin describes her encounter with Buddhism, and eventually becoming a teacher, as a process of starting, stumbling, and getting back up.  I must admit that I am biased because Geri Larkin, who was UU for a while and runs her Buddhist group through the UU Church in Detroit, was one of my favorite teachers in the Ann Arbor Zen Temple.  In fact her book is a collection of her sermons that she gave during the years I was there.  So I offer that disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure.

I am always interested in how people come to Buddhism, and Geri Larkin has one of the more interesting stories I have heard.  She came from a mostly unchurched background.  She went to business school, and became a very successful business consultant for some Fortune 500 companies.  She was making a lot of money but was under a tremendous amount of stress.  One day, while she was rushing from one appointment to the next, she noticed that her eye was twitching.  She ignored it.  After a while it got worse.  She would be in these high power meetings with a bunch of business executives and her eye would be twitching away.  As you can imagine, this grew very distracting.  So Geri went to the doctor.  The doctor told her that drugs would make her drowsy and lethargic.  Why not try meditation?  Still, she ignored her, and decided just to live with a twitchy eye.  Then the other eye began to twitch.  Now can you imagine this poor woman with two twitchy eyes?  She looked up meditation in the phone book, and she went to the Zen Buddhist temple because it was the only place offering a course in meditation.  She began to sit, and in about three weeks the twitching went away.  By then she was hooked, and the rest is history.

Any time we reach for Utopia or Enlightenment, we stumble.  I sort of define Utopia as a sort form of enlightenment; the enlightened society or culture.  These are ideals.  Enlightenment is the goal that Buddhists strive to achieve.  There might be some Buddhists who would disagree with me, but generally speaking that is the goal of the Buddhist religion in a nutshell.  To attain a level of empathy and wisdom that goes beyond our own skin and our own self-interest.  Religion is the attempt on the part of the human race to articulate its highest ideals and to implement them in actuality.  Thus we have to make a distinction between ideals and actuality.  The early days of the ecumenical movement are telling here.  One theologian, commenting on the process of comparing Christianity to other world religions, that we cannot compare the ideals of Buddhism to the reality of Christianity.  In other words what one religion claims to be the perfect person or the perfect world is a theory that it is able to implement in better or worse ways throughout its history.  Even religions stumble along the spiritual path.  The question is: Is it possible to achieve perfection?  Can we, or anyone else, actually live out those ideals, or do the best laid plans of mice and men always go awry?

Unitarian Universalists have struggled with the question of “Is perfectibility possible?” for many, many years now.  There is of course my favorite declaration at the close of the nineteenth century that Unitarians were confident in the progression of humankind “onward and upward forever!”  Sort of a difficult thing to claim with a straight face after a century of two brutal world wars, the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the fact that the Cubs have not won the championship since 1908.  The Cubs single handedly demolished this theory for many of the UUs in Chicago.

Aside from that though, Unitarians and Universalists were sufficiently impressed with our evolution to the point that they thought life would just keep getting better and better.  I am sure the dinosaurs thought the same thing just before the comet hit the Earth!  Many things have contributed to the feeling that perfectibility is possible.  Some combination of faith in God’s plan, social action for the kingdom of God, natural and social evolution, science, reason, and possibly karma has done this.  For all I know they may still, but not anytime soon.  All of these lead to a great deal of stumbling on the expressway to Utopia.

These are all great theories to explain the world is.  Explaining the world helps us get our bearings in a topsy-turvy world.  My mother, for example, believes in a form of fatalism.  She believes that when someone dies then it was his or her time.  Even if they were to dodge the car that hit them, they would still die of a heart attack that evening eating their fettuccine alfredo.  For a long time I found this attitude rather depressing.  Life is going to get you no matter.  But then I read that this was not an uncommon feeling among some of the infantry troops who saw combat.  It seems that the soldiers thought that when your time was up, then your time is up.  There is nothing you can really do about it.  Why does the bullet miss me and hit my buddy?  There is no rational explanation for this.  Many of these guys felt that when it is your time it is your time.

I think there is a natural human inclination to think that we are in control of our lives.  We think that our actions can command heaven and earth to bend to our will.  What these soldiers experienced in fighting was that it is not that simple.  There are a lot of things we are not in control of, they just happen.  The Taoists use the image of life as floating down the river.  The current sweeps us along, and all we can really do is accept the ride for what it is.  The cold hard fact is that there are a number of different factors in the world that effect our lives in direct and indirect ways that we have no control over.  Enron stockholders had no knowledge of what the company was doing, but the bankruptcy effect millions of people and their retirement plans.  Apart from the inner echelon of the Enron corporation, there is little any of us could have done to stop this even though it effects us.  It is an unfortunate result of the interconnected web of life.
It would be hubris on my part to think, “I should have done something different.  I should have been more attentive to the market.”  I have spoken with one well-respected market analyst who told me that Kennth Lay and all of those guys should be indicted; they also deserve the Oscar for best acting.  These guys convinced the savviest, hard-nose fund analysts that everything was fine, even when they knew it was all about to implode.  How could the average person possibly know?  But people beat themselves up for not knowing the future.  This is a form of ego really, that says, “I am the one in charge.  I am omniscient and therefore responsible for all things good and bad in the world.”  If Buddhism teaches us anything it is the amazing lengths our ego will go to in order to strengthen themselves.

Could the FBI have stopped the terrorist attacks on September 11 given the pieces of information they had?  I think we want to think that they could.  There is something deep within us that tells us that we could have stopped it.  Someone, other than the terrorists themselves, could have stopped it.  The biblical scholar Elaine Pagels notes in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that traditional interpretations of the Adam and Eve fall from Eden emphasize the choice they made.  They could have prevented it.  We could have chosen eternal paradise, but instead we wound up here.  Human agency is very important to us.  People will beat themselves up with guilt over the death of a loved one that they had nothing to do with.  They think that because they had some bad thoughts or wished ill upon someone that this is somehow to blame for the other person’s demise.  Pagels notes that we will just put ourselves through emotional hell to assert the simple fact that we were in charge even if we were not.

From this point of view, one could conclude that Utopia is impossible.  We are not perfect and we never will be.  Life is too complicated and there are too many other people that mess up the perfect society.  As the Greek playwrights pointed out again and again, self-aggrandizement is the royal road to self-destruction.  Perfection, Utopia, and enlightenment are a fool’s dream.  Ecclesiastes says that they are a dust blowing in the wind.

And yet I question this line of thinking.  Surely I agree that we are not in charge of the entire world.  Heck we are not in charge of a number of things that we like to think we are.  But I think that taking this passive understanding of perfection creates as many problems as it solves.  Yes we should be humble, but not to the point where we never act.  We cannot abdicate all our responsibility.  We cannot leave everything to fate.  I think we must ask ourselves: can one person make a difference?  I think the answer is yes, more than we give ourselves credit for.  Just as the negative actions of a few politicians or corporate executives can effect us all, so too can positive actions by these people.  Each and every one of us has the capability of responding to life as we choose.  We may not be able to control everything that comes our way, but how we deal with it, how we learn from it, and how we build from it, are active choices we make.  It is all too easy to become cynical, thinking that I have no control over the events of the world, so what does it matter.  It matters tremendously.

No doubt you have heard the story of the man walking along the beach seeing starfish washed ashore dying.  There are thousands of them.  One by one he throws them into the sea.  He friend says to him, “There are too many of them here.  There is no way you can possibly make a difference.”  The man responds by saying, “Yes but I made a difference to the one I just threw back.”  Mother Theresa teaches us that “the sum of all we do is but a drop in the ocean.  But if you do not contribute your work, the ocean will be one drop less.”

There is an irony here.  There is the passive view that says that Utopia or perfection is not possible.  Only a person with a large ego, and a high threshold for guilt and failure, who thinks they can do it all.  Life hands us many things we have no control over.  Contrast this to the active view that says if I do not do something, then who will?  If there is not a small group of committed individuals willing to change the world, then who will?  It reminds me of the prayer of serenity, written by Reinhold Niehbur and popularized through the twelve step programs.  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.  This is a prayer for stumblers, not only with addiction, but with any spiritual path there are things that can be changed and things that cannot.

Buddhists, not to be out done, have what they call the six perfections.  These are: generosity, energy, persistence, patience, meditation, and wisdom.  These perfection also take into consideration that we are not the center of the world, and that our egos do not cause the mountains to move and the clouds to rain.  We fall, and stumble.  This is why one practices patience and persistence.  There is, built into the religion, not a notion of eternal damnation and guilt over our actions, but encouragement to brush ourselves off, relax, and get our swing back with the next pitch.  Wisdom is the recognition that everything is impermanent, and success and failure are part of the game.  One cannot be alive without a measure of each.  Even if we were to attain enlightenment or move to Utopia, there would still be some imperfection that would creep in the next day.  But the interesting thing is that they would also say that wherever we are in the present moment, there is a little piece of that enlightenment.  As Stephen Batchelor writes, “I becomes abundantly clear that we cannot attain awakening for ourselves: we can only participate in the awakening of life.”  Perfection is not something off in the distance to be achieved by another generation.  It is something we already are a part of, but often do not recognize.  At that point we see that all of the stumbling has been for naught, and yet, we could not have had that understanding without it.  One Zen Master wrote just before his death this poem, “Ten years I have wandered the forest.  After much searching, this morning laughter by the edge of the water.”  

My friends the straight path is never as straight as it appears.  One can wander in the forest ten years with little results.  And then one day, boom.  And all you can do is laugh at the water’s edge.  We cannot control the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune anymore than I can stop the wind and the rain.  But if the wind and the rain don’t bother me, why do I need a sunny day?  Happy stumbling.  Amen, Blessed Be.